Content warning: Horrors of war. Death, starvation, torture, rape
During WWII, Japan invaded The Philippines, overthrowing USA colonizers. The USA had acted pretty awful, so you might wonder why Japan isn't remembered as a great liberator. It took real effort, but Japan acted even worse than the USA, somehow. This biography covers the life of a few people during this time. There's bravery in the face of the horrors of war.
Florence Finch's father was American; her mother was Filipino. There's some gnarly stuff in the family history; a white American hooks up with a Filipino lady for some years, then dumps her… to hook up with her daughter instead. The mestizo mixed-background kids weren't super-accepted by white American occupier society or Filipino society. (Closer to home, in San Francisco there are some history-teaching ads up on Market St about Olympic swimmer Vicki Draves. Born in San Francisco, she had a tough time getting advanced training in swimming because of course swimming pools were segregated back then. She used a fake name so she could train with a coach at a pool for whites; she'd eventually move away from San Francisco because she was tired of the racism.) But Florence could get a job with USA Army Intelligence; she could meet and marry an American soldier.
E. Carl Engelhart was her boss. When WWII started, he had the foresight to learn to speak Japanese.
Kiyoshi Osawa is a Japanese businessman living in The Philippines. He's pretty excited when WWII starts up; he's proud of his country. But when Japan invades The Philippines, he sees how brutally the military treats civilians. He tries to dissuade them from this, to no avail.
I grew up thinking of the USA's General MacArthur was pretty good at general-ing. And I suppose he did well at coordinating huge ocean-spanning campaigns, moving people and materiel around… but hoo boy this book makes clear that MacArthur's organization did not move swiftly when Japan first invaded. I'd already learned a bit about when Japan bombed Hawaii's Pearl Harbor; how a USA RADAR operator detected approaching Japanese planes, but couldn't get a warning to the necessary folks because internal communication was such a snarl&emdash;maybe understandable since this was a sneak attack, and perhaps there was some American echo chamber convincing themselves that Japan would stay busy invading plenty of other countries before they got around to the USA. Less understandable: When Japan later bombed USA airbases in The Philippines, a USA RADAR operator also spotted the attack and again couldn't get word to someone who would act on that information. Some USA folks flew some planes to fend off invaders&emdash;only to be recalled. When Japan's bombs fell, the USA's planes were on the ground, quickly destroyed. I learned about MacArthur leaving with his famous "I will return;" but until I read this book, I didn't understand how badly his organization had botched their defense.
Japan invaded. Florence's USA military intelligence office shut down. The USA military folks were killed or captured; Florence went home, didn't mention to the Japanese that she'd worked for the USA, and passed unnoticed. She knew some PoWs, knew they were starving, and bought food and supplies for them. When her money ran low, she got a job as an accountant for the Japanese occupiers, leaving her stint with the USA military off of her CV.
Japan put Kiyoshi Osawa in charge of distributing fuel. Florence worked there, keeping track of ration coupons.
Carl Engelhart was a PoW. He nearly starved; plenty of PoWs did. He and others survived because of outside aid from Florence and others. Engelhart saved some lives himself&emdash;he was one of the few who could talk to both prisoners and guards.
When the USA got their act together and started making their way back to The Philippines, the local resistance wanted to help the USA re-invaders. (How badly did the Japanese have to treat Filipino folks to make them welcome the Americans back?) For this, the resistance needed fuel. So they contacted Florence to help them steal things by getting some fake rations into the Japanese accounting books. Florence knew it was risky, but she did it anyhow.
Florence's worries were real. Though the resistance got their fuel, Florence's accounting shenanigans were detected later. She was captured, tortured, raped, starved.
As the Americans got closer, things got chaotic. Most Japanese forces fled back to Japan; they brought American PoWs with them, hoping to use them as slave labor back home. American planes bombed Japanese transport ships, not knowing which ones held fellow Americans.
Florence was freed and made her way back to Manila. She was now homeless; but people who knew her from the resistance found an out-of-the-way place to stay. It sounds bleak, but fortunately her place was so sketchy that the Manila Massacre passed over her.
This book drives home the senselessness of the Manila Massacre. When that guy from Galaxy Quest says "Never give up, never surrender!" it sounds pretty brave. But then you think about the Japanese military officer who had been left behind in charge of Manila as the main Japanese force fled. This guy was so mad about being left behind to surrender Manila to the Americans that he ordered his forces to slaughter the unarmed locals. Then he committed suicide rather than hand everything over. I guess he died thinking "death before dishonor" and something about noble samurai spirit. And if I hadn't read this book, I might have tsked and said "Well, it's tragic, but these sorts of things happen in war; maybe when he gave those orders he still thought it would tip the balance so that he could repel the Americans." But by this time, he knew an overwhelming force of Americans were coming, he knew that killing those unarmed "enemies" was pointless. Giving up and surrendering was the obvious honorable move.
Overall, this was an intense but interesting read. Recommended, but maybe you want to have something more light-hearted going on in parallel for when you need a break from reading.
